Next time it's Tuesday, you'll be voting

Less than a week, folks. That’s all the time you have to make sure you’re prepared for election day. KBIA’s been conducting in-depth interviews with political candidates for regional and statewide office in our studios, and we’re airing portions of those in these few days left leading up the election. We’re also posting the full length-interviews here on KBIA.org: we’re calling them “candidate conversations.”

We don’t want to make you feel bad if you don’t know all about the candidates you’ll be voting for yet. But you should know there’s a big group of people here in town that can’t even vote that have been researching this for months. Oakland Junior High 9th graders have been preparing for a mock political convention representing local, state, and national candidates. KBIA’s Jessica Reese covered the convention for us.

If you do some cramming before you have to fill out your ballot Nov 6th, you’ll probably find a lot of news stories mentioning the most recent polls. In fact, both of the races you’ll see on the top of your ballot – the US Presidential Race, and the US Senate race between Democrat Claire McCaskill and Republican Todd Akin – are within the margin of error in some recent polls. In his commentary this week, Columbia College Political scientist Terry Smith talks about those polls, and what they really tell us.

Don’t forget to tune in on election night starting at 7 o clock for our live election coverage. We’ll have reporters across the community covering local and regional races, and analysis from our studios.